Graphics bling and proprietary drivers in Ubuntu
December 7th, 2006
There’s currently some discussion in the Ubuntu community about how much proprietary stuff to include in Ubuntu by default (different from letting you grab stuff from the vendor on your own after the install). This is almost always about graphics drivers.
Community member Ante Karamatić had some interesting thoughts on the issue, and then made some points about the state of open source Linux gui bling, too:
Proprietary drivers in Ubuntu by default? Don’t. Just don’t do that. I don’t want them. If someone wants them (or must use them); great, make it as an installer option. ‘Yes, I want fancy graphics, even if nobody could help me solve tons of bugs and even if that would break suspend and hibernate and even if that would maybe mean braking GPL‘ would be an OK option in installer
OTOH, both compiz and beryl have serious issues and they should stop working on creating newer, even more useless plug-ins and start fixing some usability bugs; ‘java + beryl sometimes doesn’t work‘, ‘beryl crashes all the time‘, ‘don’t destroy my workspaces‘, ‘F9 is fetch all in evolution; now it doesn’t work‘, ‘what’s with the flickering in xmoto while running beryl and apt-get update‘, etc, etc…